


Cute But Prickly

by Sholio



Series: The Epic Post-Series Road Trip of Destiny [9]
Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Crack Treated Seriously, Developing Friendships, F/M, Family Issues, Getting Back Together, Humor, Post-Season/Series 02, Sharing a Bed, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-01 20:56:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16291655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: A magical accident turns Ward into a potted cactus (yes, really), and back in New York, Colleen gets a series of panicked texts from Danny and finds herself flying halfway around the world to maybe, just maybe, pick up where they left off while trying to figure out how to turn a cactus back into a person. For my h/c bingo square "accidents."





	Cute But Prickly

**Author's Note:**

> [Sheron](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheron) told me about a fic in Stony fandom in which Tony is accidentally turned into a cactus, and I immediately thought, "You know who ELSE would make a good cactus ..." As you do. I don't know whether to apologize or be impressed that this may be one of the crackiest things I've ever written, and that's really saying something.

Colleen woke facedown in a pillow to the sound of the chirp of an incoming text on her phone. She rolled over, groaned, and, with a sense of foreboding, reached for the phone. It was tempting to ignore it, but there were too many reasons why someone might be texting her at this late hour.

 **DANNY:** _Colleen, how much do you water a cactus?_

... or possibly the reason was because some people couldn't remember the time difference between New York and Nepal or wherever the hell he was right now. She groaned, resisted the urge to throw the phone across the room, and instead dropped it back on the nightstand and rolled over.

She was jolted awake by another chirp.

And another.

Colleen fumbled for her phone. It had been half an hour and there were not just one but _three_ texts from Danny.

 **DANNY:** _Im sorry I know it's late but IT'S IMPORTANT_  
_I know cactuses dont need much water but will it kill them if the soil is totally dry or what_  
_Or will wet soil kill them COLLEEN HELP_

Aloud, she muttered, "I don't _believe_ this," as she typed with irritated jabs of her thumbs.

 **COLLEEN:** _Google it._

The reply came back so fast that he must have been hovering over the phone.

 **DANNY:** _I did but theres conflicting information and it depends on what kind of cactus and I don't know what it is_  
**COLLEEN:** _Why did you think I'D know then?_  
**DANNY:** _You're smart about these things_

She was now sitting up, wide awake and annoyed, especially by the little warm wiggle that went through her chest at the compliment. With a very long sigh, she typed a reply.

 **COLLEEN:** _Did you just, like, dig up a random cactus and take it home or what?_

He probably had, she thought. It was probably something like, the cactus was growing on a construction site and Danny happened to be walking by as the construction crew was going to bulldoze up its patch of sand. It seemed like the kind of thing he'd do.

 **DANNY:** _Something like that. Colleen really, its in very dry soil and I need to know if that's okay_  
**COLLEEN:** _So you need to know what kind of cactus it is, okay, fine. Use reverse image search._  
**DANNY:** _???_  
**COLLEEN:** _Take a picture of the cactus. Go to image search. Put it in._  
**DANNY:** _See, I knew youd know!!_

There was, then, blessed silence from the phone. Colleen thought about trying to go back to sleep, but she was wide awake now, plus there was no telling how much sleep she'd actually get before Danny texted her back with some new cactus-related emergency. Also, though she didn't want to admit it and entirely against her will, she was starting to get caught up in the cactus saga.

She got out of bed, tucked the phone into the pocket of her sleeping shorts, and padded into the kitchen, where she put water on for tea. As she was fumbling in the cabinet for the box of tea, the phone chirped. Yup.

 **DANNY:** _I think its a rainbow pincushion cactus_  
**COLLEEN:** _Mystery solved, yay._  
**DANNY:** _Apprently they're very demanding and touchy cactuses to grow. Figures._

There followed a continued lack of new texts while she made tea and took it over to the table. The urge to google rainbow pincushion cactuses was almost overwhelming. Instead she opened a mystery novel she'd been reading. She got all of five pages into it.

 **DANNY:** _Colleen, I have a new problem_

Of course you do, she thought.

 **DANNY:** _Cactuses need arid conditions but I'm in Bali. Its very humid here_

Well, at least now she knew where he was.

 **DANNY:** _Humidity can cause them to rot. Im very worried about this. Ideas?_

After thinking about that for a minute, she texted back:

 **COLLEEN:** _Put it in a jar or something, and put in some of those desiccant packs. the silica gel things._  
**DANNY:** _Colleen you're a genius._  
**COLLEEN:** _You're welcome. So are you going to send me a picture of your new best friend?_  
**DANNY:** _???_  
**COLLEEN:** _The cactus, Danny._  
**DANNY:** _Right, sorry._

After a minute, a photo came through. It was kind of blurry and looked like it was sitting on a windowsill in what was probably a hotel; she could see sunlight behind it. It was ball-shaped and extremely prickly-looking. Not the kind of cactus with flowers and charm, but the kind that was pretty much all prickles. Danny had planted it in a styrofoam coffee cup. Colleen knew she was anthropomorphizing, but she didn't think it looked happy to be there. If a cactus could look annoyed, this one did.

Danny had also written something in blue ballpoint pen on the cup. She had to squint to read it, and when she did, she grinned. It said "Ward."

 **COLLEEN:** _You picked up a cactus for Ward? Danny, that's actually really cute._

She expected a text back immediately, but there was silence instead. It went on long enough that she picked up her book, then put it down again. Had she said something wrong and upset him?

 **COLLEEN:** _Danny? Everything okay?_  
**DANNY:** _Mostly. Im just trying to decide how to tell you something_

Well, that was ominous. An awful possibility occurred to her -- awful for Danny, anyway.

 **COLLEEN:** _Danny ... Ward's okay, isn't he? Did something happen?_  
**DANNY:** _SO yeah.  
About that._

More silence.

Shit. She didn't like this at all. She typed, deleted, typed again, edited it several times before sending it.

 **COLLEEN:** _Danny, if something's happened to Ward, you can talk to me about it. I'll listen. Are you okay?_  
**DANNY:** _No no, its not as bad as what you're thinking!_  
**COLLEEN:** _Ward's okay, then?_  
**DANNY:** _Well, mostly. See, we were in this temple, looking for clues on the Iron Fist_

No more texts came through for awhile. God, she thought, what _happened?_

 **COLLEEN:** _Go on. I'm listening._  
**DANNY:** _Ward touched something in there. I still dont know what. It turned him into that.  
The cactus is Ward._

She reread the text several times. It still said exactly what it said the first time.

 **COLLEEN:** _Who the what now._  
**DANNY:** _The cactus is Ward_  
**COLLEEN:** _It's not that I didn't understand your WORDS. I understood the WORDS just fine._

She scrolled back up and looked at the picture of the cactus again, in its little styrofoam coffee cup, sulking on its windowsill. It would be nice if she could say that there was no resemblance, but that would be a lie. In fact, if she had ever seen a plant that was the absolute embodiment of Ward Meachum, this was that plant.

 **DANNY:** _Colleen do you think the jar should have air holes._

"Um," she said aloud. All of a sudden she could see why Danny had been stressing over minor issues of plant care. If making the wrong decision could kill his brother, no wonder he was losing his mind over this. 

She looked at the picture of the cactus again, laid the phone down, and indulged in about ten or fifteen seconds of hysterical laughter. And then she called Danny.

 _"Colleen,"_ Danny said, sounding overwhelmingly relieved. "I'm so sorry, I _know_ it's the middle of the night there and I probably woke you up, but I was sort of, um. Panicking."

"I can see why." She leaned her elbow on the table and closed her eyes. Circumstances aside, it was always good to hear his voice. "Danny, don't take this the wrong way, but are you absolutely _sure_ that's Ward? I mean, could you be wrong? You have to admit ..."

"I know how crazy it sounds," Danny said, sounding frustrated. "I know! But I _saw_ it, Colleen. He was there and then he wasn't, there was just ... _this_ , on the floor. I picked him up and got the hell out of there before it happened to me too."

Colleen blew out a breath. "And you don't know how to undo it? Well, I guess if you knew, you wouldn't be asking me about how often to water him." The last words came out on a choked, half-hysterical giggle. She clapped her hand over her mouth until she got herself under control.

"No, I don't. I should've gone back in right then, but I couldn't think what to ..." Danny trailed off. The desperation in his voice helped shake her out of her impending giggle fit; he really sounded upset. "I brought him to a hotel to get him into some dirt because it seemed like it couldn't possibly be good for him to have, you know, his roots exposed, and I didn't have anything to pot him into out there."

Oops, no, she wasn't over the giggles after all. Colleen stared up at the ceiling and struggled her way through a silent fit of laughter.

"Colleen?" Danny said anxiously. "Are you still there?"

"Yes, yes, I'm still here." To her relief, her voice came out steady. "Look, the nice thing is, cactuses are really resilient. It's not going to die from not being watered or having the wrong amount of sunshine for a few days."

"He," Danny said. "Not it."

"... right, he. Look, Danny, my point is, if he had to be a plant for awhile, this isn't a bad kind of plant to be. I'd say forget about the thing with the jar and just keep him on the windowsill --" _I will not laugh, I will not laugh_ "-- while you figure out how to fix him."

"I'm going back to the temple as soon as I get Ward settled here --"

"No!" Colleen said, sitting bolt upright. "You said you don't know what he touched, right? What's to stop it from happening to you? You can't go back alone."

"So what am I supposed to do, carry Ward around in his pot for the rest of his life?"

Colleen rubbed her forehead, where a headache was gathering from a combination of tension and being roused after two hours of sleep, not to mention the effort of keeping her urge to burst into laughter under control. "Can I use Rand resources to buy a plane ticket?"

"Yes, of course you can -- actually, forget tickets, use the Rand jet. But, Colleen, you don't have to come --"

"Yes, I do," she told him flatly. "Because I am not putting _you_ on the windowsill and watering you every six weeks for the rest of your life, either."

 

***

 

She had forgotten how thoroughly it screwed the hell out of her circadian rhythms to fly halfway around the world. She touched down in Denpasar, Bali, with only the blue sky outside the plane to tell her that it wasn't the middle of the night. Scratchy-eyed, aching and exhausted, she collected her backpack and katana, and reeled off the plane into a wall of heat and humidity, where a beaming Danny in an open-necked polo shirt met her on the tarmac. 

Going into his arms felt like the most natural thing in the world.

"Colleen," he murmured into her hair, hugging her until she could hardly breathe. "Colleen. Thank you, _thank_ you for coming."

She couldn't answer; she just hugged him and hugged him. It had been easy enough, for the most part, not to think about how much she missed him in New York -- she just tried to keep herself busy, and it wasn't like there was a shortage of things to do. Only now, with his arms around her, she felt as if something vital had been missing and now it had snapped back into place.

"It shouldn't take Ward being turned into a cactus for us to see each other," she murmured into his shoulder. Then the words she'd actually said caught up with her. She was too tired to choke off the laugh that burst out of her.

Danny started laughing too. They clung to each other and giggled helplessly, until Colleen pulled away, wiping at her eyes.

"Sorry," she gasped. "I swore up and down I wasn't going to do that. I _know_ it's serious."

"Oh, trust me, I'm just as aware as you are that the entire situation is ridiculous," Danny said. He didn't offer to take her bag, just another little tick in the long, long list of things she really liked about Danny Rand. Instead they started strolling toward a mud-covered Jeep parked near the plane. 

"Where is he?"

"Back at the hotel. I thought about bringing him along but then I got worried that I'd drop him or something, and what if I broke off some spines? Or if he got crushed? He could come back missing an arm, or dead."

"I think you're over-thinking this." She was already sweating, and the Jeep, with its top down, provided no protection from the ever-present, wet-towel-wrapped-around-her-face humidity. No wonder Danny was worried about a cactus in this climate. "Have you been back to the temple yet?"

Danny shook his head. "No, I think you're right about not going alone. See, I _did_ learn your lesson about thinking before jumping in. I've been doing research instead." He smiled, and she found herself smiling back. Months of separation had muted the conflicted feelings she'd had, dulled the pain, and left her in a wash of giddy delight just to be with him again. There was some part of her that had forgotten how easy he was to be with, how easy he'd _always_ been to be with.

"So tell me what's new in New York," Danny said as he pulled out into traffic.

"Well, no one's been turned into a cactus lately."

"That you know of."

 

***

 

As soon as they stepped into the hotel room, Danny called in the general direction of the windowsill, "Hey, Ward! Colleen's here."

"Do you think he can hear us?" She caught herself starting to whisper and forced her voice to a normal level as she dropped her bag and katana beside the bed.

"I don't know, but I don't want to ignore him. He might be able to remember all of this."

Colleen went over to investigate the cactus on the windowsill. In the time since she'd last talked to Danny, Ward had been transplanted from the styrofoam cup into a very nice little terra-cotta pot. Danny had also put some little pebbles and things into the pot to class it up. It was adorable and sweet and very Danny, and she hoped Ward appreciated the thought, if he was capable of appreciating anything at the moment.

And if that was actually Ward. She remained skeptical.

Still, Danny was looking at her expectantly, so (mostly for Danny's sake) she said, "Hi, Ward. We're gonna get you out of this." And now, she thought, I'm talking to cactuses.

Danny sat on the bed and reached for his laptop. "I've been going over everything I can find. The temple's history, local rumors and legends, worldwide tales of people being turned into plants, and transformation in general ... there's a huge amount of information to sort through."

"Have you slept at all?" Now that she thought about it, he looked as tired as she felt. She hadn't noticed in the car; her brain was running at approximately a quarter of normal speed.

"There's no _time,_ " Danny said, flipping the laptop open. "We could be racing a clock on this."

"He's a cactus," Colleen pointed out. She went into the bathroom and splashed water on her face. "It's not like cacti have the lifespan of a mayfly. We need to take the time to do this properly rather than rushing into anything, and that includes getting enough sleep not to make stupid mistakes. Anyway," she added, reaching for a towel, "Ward wouldn't want you to run yourself ragged over this, would he? Let alone do anything that's going to get you hurt." She and Ward didn't see eye to eye on much, but one thing she was reasonably confident they did agree on was concern for Danny's welfare.

"Ngghh." Glancing out of the open bathroom door, she saw Danny rub a hand over his face. "It's fine. I just need more coffee."

"No, you need sleep. Look, I'll set my phone alarm to wake us up in a couple hours, okay? We won't sleep too long. Just enough that we're not braindead enough to be stupid and wreck our chances of saving Ward by getting ourselves killed or turned into a nice ornamental hedge."

Danny snorted a laugh. "I guess you've got a point." He closed the laptop and rose to put it on the room's small desk. Then there was a pause, as they both looked at the single queen-sized bed.

"I'll take the floor," Danny said decisively.

"Don't be ridiculous. We're both grownups. We can share a bed." And they _had_ shared a bed for a year, which she was trying very hard not to think about at the moment. Danny's warmth next to her, the way he used to roll over and put an arm over her in the night ...

"I'm sorry," Danny said. "I didn't think about -- I mean. This is awkward. I can go get another room for you, it's not like I can't afford it --"

"Go to sleep!" she told him, and closed the bathroom door.

She didn't really need to use the toilet, and she kinda did need a shower but didn't feel like doing it before getting some sleep. Mostly she just wanted to not have to look at Danny's stupid face and want to kiss it. Kissing, she thought, might reasonably come later; there was no reason _not_ to. It wasn't a break-up so much as just ... a break.

But still. It had been months.

_We need to talk about this._

_Preferably not in front of Ward._

She took a drink of water and washed her hands thoroughly, and then cracked the door open and peeked out.

Danny was curled up on the bed, fully dressed on top of the covers and rolled over so he was facing away from the opposite side of the bed and taking up as little room as possible, out like a light.

"Ridiculous," she muttered. It wasn't like they couldn't behave like responsible adults even if they were half-naked under the covers.

Danny, warm, lying against her ...

She squeezed her aching eyes shut and started to unzip her jeans, then gave a sharp look toward the cactus in the window.

She was about 90% sure that either the cactus wasn't Ward, or if it _was_ Ward, he was completely oblivious to everything going on in the room because _he was a goddamn cactus._ However, she was just that little bit not-quite-sure enough that she didn't want to get undressed in front of him. It. Whatever.

After some thought, she went over to the window and drew the drapes, so the cactus's view of the room was shrouded. For extra security, she took the ice bucket from the desk, wedged the cactus into the corner of the windowsill, and put the ice bucket where it blocked the angle between the bed and the window. (She had thought about turning the ice bucket upside down over the cactus, which made more sense to her, but Danny might object.)

"Night, Ward," she told it. "If you are in fact Ward."

She wriggled out of her jeans and slithered under the covers with a healthy buffer of space between herself and Danny. She had just enough presence of mind to set her alarm, and then she fell asleep.

Or tried to.

Her body had other plans.

For one thing, her body was acutely aware of Danny's presence in the bed next to her. She lay with her eyes closed, hoping her body would get the picture and drift off, but that just made her more aware of every little sound Danny made beside her, every creak of the mattress, every shift when he moved. Then she opened her gritty eyes and stared at the dimly lit ceiling, but that didn't help either; it made her body notice that it was light outside and decide that night was over and it was time to get up.

She heaved an exhausted sigh and sat up. At least Danny was getting some rest, and she'd been able to sleep on the plane, off and on. Maybe this would be a good opportunity to look through his research.

Also, she couldn't help thinking that since she'd shoved Ward against the window, he was now exposed to direct tropical sunshine as well as being trapped between the ice bucket and the window. It might get really hot in there. She glanced guiltily toward the window. Cactuses surely liked it hot, but direct tropical sun while pressed against a window pane might be pushing it. She didn't want to be responsible for turning Danny's brother into a scorched plant husk.

She put on her pants and went over to the window. The cactus still looked fine, but its pot was awfully warm to the touch. "Sorry," Colleen told it. Now she was apologizing to a cactus. This day just got better and better. 

Still, she didn't really want to leave the cactus there in case she'd gone and made the window dangerously hot for it, so she took it with her to the desk and set it down by her elbow while she opened up Danny's laptop. Hell, if it _was_ Ward, it might appreciate reading over her shoulder (or more like under her arm). Being a cactus had to be mind-numbingly boring. And while she was reasonably sure that something couldn't actually _get_ bored if it didn't have a brain to start with, there was still that little part of her that wasn't sure.

Danny hadn't been kidding about the scope of his research. The desktop of his computer was covered with downloaded files; there were also about a million browser tabs open. She hunted through it until she found the local material, particularly a Word document in which he'd copied and pasted scraps of text from what looked like message boards and news stories. Mostly, it consisted of stories of ghosts and other odd happenings in the vicinity of a particular temple out beyond Denpasar's urban sprawl.

In her tired state, it was hard to keep her mind on what she was doing. The room was uncomfortably hot. It had central air, but that wasn't doing much, producing a faint coolish breeze that stirred the hot air around. Outside, the noise of traffic and pedestrians provided a slightly different counterpoint to her reading than the New York street noise. Every city had its own sound, its own feel.

And she kept glancing back toward the bed. Danny's face was turned away from her, but there was an aching familiarity in the curve of his cheek, the golden bristle of stubble. His hair was longer than it had been the last few months in New York, grown out almost to the curly mop it had been when she'd first met him.

"Where did we go wrong, anyway?" she asked the cactus softly. "Danny and me. We used to be so good. How'd we get so messed up?" Like she thought a cactus was going to answer her. "I don't know why I'm asking you. You didn't even like me all that much."

Or did he? It was hard to tell, with Ward. She hadn't liked _him_ ; she'd never really warmed up to him. And yet, she couldn't deny that he was an important part of Danny's life. For whatever reason, Danny adored him.

She'd actually found herself liking Ward better since he'd been gone. They'd had brief exchanges during some of Danny's calls back to New York, and she wasn't sure if it was the buffer of having several thousand miles between them, or if it was that he really _had_ changed since he'd been gone, but she found him a little easier to talk to than he used to be. Less of a gratuitous jerk, maybe.

"I'm glad he's got you with him," she told the cactus quietly. "It's not good for him to be alone. He's been alone too much in his life. I'm not entirely sure why he's decided you're one of the people he trusts that way, but he did, and he does. And the one thing I trust you for -- and I can't believe I'm saying this, given how many times you betrayed and tried to kill him -- is that you wouldn't hurt Danny, or let him get hurt if you could help it."

She poked at the cactus's pot, rotating it on the desk, and scratched idly at her arm.

"I kinda wish I'd gotten to know you a little better while I had the chance, to be honest. I know it wasn't _just_ you; it was me too. But ... I don't know, Ward. You first meet someone when they're trying to bribe you to sell out your friend, and it leaves a bad impression--"

She stopped talking, because she had finally noticed something she would probably have noticed earlier if she hadn't been so exhausted and jetlegged. She was scratching at her arm, because the tattoo itched.

It had done that for the first few weeks after she got it, at first because (she assumed) it was healing, but it went on a lot longer than she felt it should have. After that, it tended to itch and burn when she used it, or when she woke from certain particularly vivid dreams, usually involving dragons.

It wasn't like a spider sense that warned of trouble. But it _did_ tend to react to what she could only describe as magic. Not always, and not much, but it was definitely doing something here.

Colleen held her arm against the cactus's pot, and then with a murmured, "Hope you don't mind, Ward," she brushed the tattoo against the cactus's spines.

If she was expecting a reaction, she didn't get one. It just kept itching, a mild sensation under the skin, like the discomfort of the pressure of a bra strap that had been pressing into the skin too long. (Which was also happening, come to think of it; she'd been wearing the same bra for over 24 hours. She reached up and twitched it to a different location over her shoulder. If only she could do the same for the tattoo.)

"So there _is_ something weird about you," she told the cactus thoughtfully. Her arm stung; some of the cactus's spines had pricked her enough to leave blood. "Oh, thanks for that," she remarked, wiping it away with her thumb and wondering if it was her imagination that the cactus looked a trifle smug.

It was also about the time she'd set her alarm to wake them up. She glanced at the drapes, where the light coming through the crack between the panels was starting to deepen into gold. They needed to get a move on if they were going to have a chance to do anything before dark.

"Stay," she told the cactus, and got up and went over to the bed.

Danny was so deeply asleep that he hadn't stirred while she'd been up. She had forgotten how soft he looked when he was sleeping. Carefully, moving the bed no more than necessary, she sat down in the "C" of his curled body. 

And she stayed there for a few minutes, just looking down at him, watching him sleep. Tracing the play of the sliver of afternoon sun across his face, the way it touched gold from his hair; measuring out the passage of time in his soft, steady breathing.

"I missed you," she told him quietly. 

She had worked very hard on not saying it while she was in New York and he was out here. She hadn't wanted to throw a chain on him. At first, she had walked away because _she_ needed time; then _he'd_ walked away, and she realized he needed time as much as she did, but she also realized he'd come back in a heartbeat if she asked him to. And that was why she couldn't. Because he needed to figure things out too, and then they'd see if they were still puzzle pieces who fit together, or if they'd changed so much they couldn't fit anymore.

It had made sense in New York. She had to be there. He had to be here.

Now she wondered if she'd only been fooling herself all along. Making herself believe they were where they had to be, when it was only that the right words were too hard to say.

She glanced at the cactus on the desk. The shaft of afternoon sun had moved along to illuminate its spines and cast a long shadow across the desk. They needed to get going.

"Danny," she murmured, reaching out to brush the curls off his forehead. She turned her hand, brushing the backs of her fingers across his cheek. "Danny. Hey. Time to go."

He woke with a jerk, and his eyes opened, looking up at her in that dazed moment when sleep still had him. There was softness and warmth and then ... then he woke up all the way, just as she realized her hand was still on his cheek and snatched it back. Danny took a breath and sat up.

"Ugh," he said, rubbing at his eyes, face turned down, anywhere but at her. "How long was I out?"

"Not too long." She nodded at the table. "I couldn't sleep, so I've been looking over your research. You want to grab a bite to eat and head out?"

"Mmm. Guess so." He yawned and lurched off the bed. "You need to do anything before we go?"

She wished in retrospect that she'd taken a shower, but doing it now was time she didn't want to waste. "No. I'm good. Just let me grab my gear."

Danny went to the room's safe -- she hadn't even noticed it (next to the minifridge) until he knelt to punch in a combination and pulled out something long and leathery that had been crammed in there. She turned to look as he buckled the gunbelt around his hips.

"Those are Orson Randall's guns?" She had seen them on the small screen of her phone, when Danny had showed them to her, but this was her first chance to see them in person. Like the cactus in its pot, they made her tattoo burn and itch. 

Actually, come to think of it, she might have been jumping to conclusions blaming the cactus. For all she knew, it had been the guns doing it to her all along, and the cactus was still just a cactus.

"Yeah, want to see?" Without waiting for a reply, Danny drew one of the guns -- they were Colt 1911s, gleaming and well cared for -- and held it out to her butt-first. 

She started to reach for it. Her tattoo flared with a sudden prickling rush of pins and needles, and she dropped her hand. Danny looked surprised and a little hurt.

"It's not you," she said. "I think the, um, the Fist doesn't like it."

"Huh. That's interesting." Danny gave her a worried look. "Do you feel like it's unhealthy for you to be close to them?"

"I don't think so. It's okay." Now that she was no longer trying to pick up the gun, the tattoo had settled back to a faint itching that was reasonably easy to ignore; she'd had plenty of practice during the winter. Curiosity compelled her to add, "What does it feel like, using them?"

"It's hard to explain. Different from the Iron Fist, but kind of the same? I can tell they're channeling my chi. It's not me. But it _is_ me ... I don't know." He trailed off into silence and holstered the gun. "Different."

"I'm ..." Now it was her turn to trail off, realizing she'd been on the verge of apologizing, and that was ridiculous. Giving her the Iron Fist had been Danny's idea; he'd talked her into it over her objections. It wasn't like she'd taken something that was rightfully his.

Except for all the ways that she had.

In that awkward silence, Danny picked up a pickle jar from the shelf above the minifridge and went over to the table. There were, she noticed, air holes punched in the lid. "Sorry, man," Danny told the cactus. "You'll be safer in here."

"You're bringing him?" Colleen said.

"I think I'd better. The point is to turn him back. There's no way to do that if we don't have him along." He sounded like he was trying to convince himself, as he gently put the cactus in the jar and screwed the lid on.

 

***

 

They got street food on the way -- grilled meat on skewers, and some kind of rice thing wrapped in a banana leaf -- and ate in the car, driving out of the city as the sun sank toward the horizon and turned the hills to molten gold. Since Danny was driving, Colleen held the jar in the crook of her arm and tried not to feel too weird about it.

"How did you find this place, exactly?" she asked, as they turned off a winding dirt road that zigzagged between tin-roofed shanties and farms onto an even smaller road, more of a goat path, with broad-leafed tropical vegetation hanging into it. Danny had slowed to a crawl; she occasionally had to reach up and push sweeping branches out of their way.

"We were following local legends of a ruined temple where people used to go to gain some sort of powers," Danny said. "There were stories of some kind of dragonlike supernatural creature there, and people undergoing ... transformations."

"Into a cactus."

"They didn't mention that part!"

"Seriously," she said, looking down at the cactus in the jar she was trying to keep more or less upright for no good reason she could think of, "why a cactus? They're not even native to this part of the world."

"I don't know. Like I said --"

"The legends didn't mention that. Right. Maybe he didn't pass the test. The local dragon didn't like him."

She genuinely wasn't sure how serious she was being, but now Danny looked incredibly worried. "Taking him back might not be the best idea, then. But I don't know what else to do."

"It's not like either of us know how this works." She looked down at the cactus in her lap again. "Maybe it represents his essential inner nature."

"Prickly?"

"Well ..."

"They bloom, you know," Danny said. "I looked it up. They're basically just a ball of spines most of the time, but then they make these beautiful little colorful blossoms, like they have all of this hidden beauty inside them waiting to show." He smiled; it looked sad. "It fits him, I think."

She hadn't really ever seen much of that. But Danny had. She thought about Ward's visible worry when Danny had been hurt, the way he'd hovered around, and hadn't said a word of complaint about taking care of Danny afterwards.

And Danny had lost so much in his life. His parents. His world. Both of the other people he considered his siblings were out of his life now, in both cases after betraying him.

He didn't deserve to lose anyone else.

"We should have a plan," she said. "It doesn't seem like a good idea to just run in and start poking things."

"I'm open to ideas. Wait, the trail's around here somewhere." Danny slowed the Jeep until they were barely moving, then stopped, and pointed to a bandana tied to a tree branch. "We're going to have to walk from here."

It wasn't quite dusk yet, but it was getting close. The humming of insects rose around them when he shut off the Jeep. They took turns spraying on bug dope from a bottle in the back of the Jeep; then Danny handed her a large flashlight from the Jeep's equipment box and took one for himself.

"Are you sure we shouldn't come back by daylight?" Colleen asked as Danny picked up a machete and led the way down the trail. She tried to tell herself that Bali, as an island, didn't have any dangerous large animals, and even if they did, a woman with an Iron Fist-powered katana didn't have anything to worry about. She mostly succeeded.

"It won't matter once we're inside. It's dark in there anyway." Danny looked back, his eyes wide and full of concern. "I don't want to put you in danger, Colleen. I'm just worried."

"I know," she sighed, and looked down at the jar. Since Danny had the machete and knew where he was going, she continued to be the cactus porter. "I understand. Really, I do."

And she did ... kind of. She understood in theory. There were people she could imagine doing this kind of thing for. Misty, for one. Danny. Claire, probably? 

... precious few of them, though, if she were going to be honest with herself. That kind of near-fanatical loyalty that Danny had for the people he considered his brothers and sisters, his friends, his family ... she wasn't sure if she had anyone in her life that she was like that with. She just couldn't attach the way he could. The only people she ever had attached herself to in that way had tried to kill her after she'd betrayed them. One of the only people who was family to her, she'd beheaded with the katana she was carrying right now; the other one was in front of her right now, but might as well be a million miles away.

She was horrified to find tears prickling at her eyes. At least the gathering darkness hid it, and Danny was busy hacking foliage out of the trail anyway. Colleen swallowed hard, dashed at her eyes with fingers that stung her eyes slightly (stupid bug dope) and muttered in the general direction of the jar, "If you tell anyone about this, I'll put you in a terrarium and sell you to an eight-year-old."

"Did you say something, Colleen?" Danny asked over his shoulder.

She swallowed hard and snugged the jar into the crook of her arm. "Just wondering how close we were."

"We're actually there."

She had been subconsciously expecting the jungle to open up into a clearing, with a vine-draped stone facade looming in front of them. That was what ruined temples looked like in the movies. Instead, the ground had grown increasingly rocky and unstable. She scuffed at the moss under her foot and saw, shining the flashlight down, part of a carved face looking up at her.

They were _on_ it. What she'd thought was a hill they were climbing was actually the temple itself.

Danny had stopped to wait for her. "How do we get in?" she asked, hurrying to catch up with his light. It was almost fully dark now.

"The entrance is nearby."

There were signs of vine-clearing from the stonework in this area, a crowbar and a bigger machete leaning against a carved rock face, and a black, narrow gap. Colleen shone her light on it doubtfully.

"I can take Ward," Danny suggested. He leaned the machete with the rest of the tools and held out a hand.

"No, you know where you're going, and you'll need both hands for the guns. I can wield the katana one-handed. Just show me where to go."

There was also, in the back of her head, the idea that if anything _did_ happen, Danny was the one who was most likely to be able to deal with it. He'd fought a dragon. She might have the Iron Fist now, but this was worlds outside her bailiwick. She'd rather have him fighting to protect both of them than encumbered by holding a jar that might or might not contain the mortal remains of his brother.

Danny hesitated, then nodded, and hopped down into the hole. "There's a step down," his voice echoed back, and the flashlight flickered around inside; she saw it bounce off the walls.

Colleen stepped carefully down, the jar tucked into her arm and the flashlight in her other hand. The first step was a long step down, but then there was a set of narrow stairs that led down to a flagged stone floor, littered with leaves and dead curls of moss.

It was incredibly quiet in here. Danny was already off in an exploratory circuit of what appeared to be a fairly large room, to the extent that she could see much of anything except in the pool of light around his flashlight and her own. His footsteps echoed around the room.

Clutching the jar, she shone the light in a random direction and let out a small gasp, not quite a shriek, when a face leered back at her. _Statue,_ she thought, shining the light into the stone face with its lips pulled back from oversized teeth. She played the light down its body, a squat monstrous thing with griffinlike wings.

There was another beside it, and another beyond that, statues all around the inside of the room, ornately carved and larger than human size. Some of them weren't terribly dissimilar from temple statues she remembered from her childhood in Japan, guardian lions and the like, although these were more like gargoyles. She wasn't sure if they were meant to be gods, monsters, guardians, or something else. Whatever they were, their workmanship was exquisite.

And she really didn't like getting separated from Danny like this. "Be careful!" she called across the room. "Don't touch anything."

"I'm not going to," his voice echoed back.

Colleen crossed the floor to join him anyway, shining her light around. "Where did it happen?"

"Here," Danny said.

Colleen took a hasty step backward, though obviously she hadn't been cactus-ified, so there was no immediate danger. They were standing between two statues, facing a section of wall roughly the same as any other part of the wall, which was to say, covered with bas-relief carvings and flaking paint. There were no depictions of cactuses visible anywhere on the wall that she could see, and also no helpful interpretation in the form of usefully explanatory carvings. It looked like the wall depicted some kind of battle.

Danny turned to shine his flashlight anxiously on the cactus in its jar. Colleen held it up so they could both look at it. It was still just a little prickly cactus in a cheerful terra-cotta pot.

"Well, of course it wasn't going to be _easy,"_ Colleen said, and Danny huffed out a nervous laugh. Then he reached out and tapped the glass lightly.

"Ward," he said, "I don't know if you can hear me, but we're gonna fix this. We _will_ fix this."

It suddenly occurred to Colleen to wonder what kind of plant Danny would turn into. He'd be the sweetest plant, she thought. He would probably be a sunflower. Or a daisy.

What about herself? A thistle, maybe. Something tough and tenacious, she thought.

And none of this was getting them any closer to finding a solution. She looked at the wall again. "What were you two doing when Ward got ... cactivized?"

"We were trying to find a door," Danny said. "This temple complex is obviously bigger than this room, so we thought there might be some kind of hidden door around here somewhere. I don't know if Ward touched something, said something ..."

Pissed off some supernatural entity or other, Colleen thought. She looked up at the statues flanking them. Both were built along general lion/dragon lines, making her think again of the guardian lions that were called fu-dogs in the West.

Without really thinking about it, she shifted her flashlight into her other hand, the jar tucked into the crook of her arm, and reached out toward the nearest of the statues with her tattooed arm.

"Colleen!" Danny exclaimed.

"It's okay." She placed her hand on its cool stone flank. It made her feel grounded, the way she felt when she meditated in the dojo. "I don't think this happened just because of Ward putting his hands on something in here. If that was the case, this place would be full of potted cacti and it's not."

"Maybe they turned on the defenses when they left," Danny muttered.

Colleen barely heard him. She closed her eyes, feeling the stone smooth and solid beneath her hand. It was hard to figure out _what_ she was feeling, exactly. There was a sense of a circuit closing.

"Colleen!"

She opened her eyes at the alarm in Danny's voice.

It took her a moment to realize not all the light in the room was coming from the flashlights. Her tattoo was glowing, a winding ribbon of white light curling down her arm.

"Starting to think we weren't wrong this place had something to do with Shou-Lao," Danny murmured, gazing at it in awe.

"I don't think so." Her voice came out distracted and distant to her own ears. "I think ... it feels like ..."

It felt like she'd made contact with something, was the only thing she could think -- something indescribably vast and alien, something that wasn't particularly interested in the humans at all, any more than Colleen normally paid attention to the ants running around on the ground ... but she could feel it suddenly turning its interest on the fire that lived in her body.

"It's different," she gasped out, and tried to pull her hand away. It felt like it was glued to the statue.

"Colleen!"

She almost lost her grip on the jar in her alarm, and did drop the flashlight. Danny put an arm around her, steadying the jar against her chest with one hand, and closed the fingers of his other hand around her wrist. There was a sharp sensation that snapped through her like an electrical spark, and she felt that vast interest fixing on them. It was less like being looked at than like having a thunderstorm rolling down on her, that shivering heaviness in the air that came before lightning.

_We woke something up. And I don't think it wants us here._

Danny wrenched her hand off the statue. "Colleen, tell me what's happening."

She stumbled back against him, feeling shaky, as if she'd just been electrocuted. At first she thought that was the only reason she was off balance; then she realized the ground was actually trembling underfoot.

"We have to get out of here," she gasped out. She didn't know what Shou-lao had been like, but one thing she knew for sure: she couldn't imagine trying to fight this thing. It wasn't a being so much as a force of nature. Turning them all into cactuses was the _least_ of what it could do. She had the feeling that it could extinguish them just by breathing on them, snuff out their lives like candle flames.

"What's going on?" Danny asked. He was still holding onto her, and as rocks began to fall from the ceiling, he curled around her, trying to shield both her and the jar.

"I think I just met what lives here, and it doesn't like us!"

They sprinted for the door as the ceiling began to cave in. Danny drew his guns and, with speed and grace that Colleen couldn't help admiring despite the desperation of their situation, began to shoot tumbling chunks of masonry out of the air, vaporizing them before they could hit the ground or the two of them.

A huge block of stone tumbled in front of the door. "Hold this!" Colleen gasped, shoving the jar in Danny's general direction. She powered up the Fist and smashed into the stone full-force. In an explosion of gravel, she tumbled through, and she and Danny helped each other through the narrow gap to the humid night outside.

They'd lost the flashlights in their escape, so all they had was the glow of her tattoo and the newly risen moon to illuminate their stumbling flight down the hillside. Colleen could feel the ground shuddering under them, sinking and settling, throwing her off at every step. 

When they reached stable ground, she stumbled to a halt and turned back. The hill itself had settled noticeably, trees standing askew on its summit in dark outline against the faintly luminous sky.

"Are we safe?" Danny asked. He had the jar in one hand, a softly glowing gun in the other.

"Hang on." Colleen knelt and laid a hand against the damp soil. She didn't really want to; she was terrified of feeling that sense of vast _presence_ turn toward her again. But there was nothing. She felt only quiescence, the calm of the great deep earth.

"I think we're all right." She sank down to the ground, her legs giving out under her. Danny joined her after a moment. The glow around his gun died, along with the clear white flame from her tattoo.

They sat in the darkness for a few minutes as the hillside continued to settle, occasional muffled thumps or cracking sounds indicating the final collapse of whatever structure had been underneath the overgrown jungle.

"So ..." Danny said after awhile. "That didn't go according to plan."

Colleen managed a small laugh and leaned her shoulder against his. "I think the moral of that story is, don't mess with ancient beings and their temples. They don't seem to like being bothered."

"Yeah, but we didn't ..."

Colleen tilted her head to look at him. Her eyes had adjusted to the moonlight filtering through the trees, enough to see that he was looking down at the jar that he was still holding.

"I'm going back in there," Danny said suddenly. "I'm going to talk to it."

He started to lurch to his feet. Colleen caught a double fistful of his shirt and pulled him back down.

"You are doing nothing of the sort," she snapped. "Danny, I don't know that that _was_ , but whatever it was made Shou-Lao look like a gecko, you understand that? If you go back there, it will _kill_ you. It won't even have to think about it. We're like ants to something like that. Or bacteria. I don't know what's up with the cactus thing, maybe it's a warning or maybe it's just a ... an _accident,_ like a sneeze for something that powerful. But it's not going to fix Ward just because we ask. We're only going to get ourselves killed." And maybe a lot of other people, she didn't say. Perhaps this kind of thing was why volcanoes were worshipped as gods. Maybe this was how islands ended up covered in cinders and lava.

"Yes, but I can't just -- I'm not going to --" Danny took a shuddering breath. "I'm not going to give up on him. I'm not. If there's something in there that was able to do _this,_ then it can fix it. If I can't bargain with it, maybe I can force it."

Colleen closed her eyes for a moment. _You punch ONE dragon in the heart, and suddenly you think you can take on the world ..._

"Give him to me," she said.

Danny silently handed her the jar. She unscrewed the lid and took out the cactus, sitting with it in her lap.

"What are you doing?" Danny asked quietly. He sat with one arm thrown over his knee, watching her in the leaf-dappled moonlight.

"You healed me of poison, once. This is ... different, but maybe not too different."

She cupped her hands around the cactus in its pot. In the months she'd had the Iron Fist, she hadn't yet tried to heal with it. Or ... purge, purify, whatever the thing was that Danny had done to save her life. She'd told herself it was that it simply hadn't come up, but now she wondered if that had really been the issue.

When she thought of what she was about to try with the cactus, her instinctive gut reaction was unreasoning fear. She didn't _want_ to. With Danny, maybe she could have. With anyone else ... and with _Ward,_ of all people ...

It felt like a surrender of herself. It was too open, too exposing. Danny could open himself up like that; he'd always been able to. She didn't think she could.

"Colleen?" Danny asked, sensing her nervousness. "If this is dangerous, you don't have to. We'll find another way."

"No." She swallowed and clasped her left hand around the cactus's terra-cotta pot. "Could you just ... steady me, I guess? I don't know what's going to happen."

"Sure."

His arms went around her from behind. She held herself back for a second or two before realizing that if she couldn't sink into the support Danny was offering her, there was no way she was going to be able to open herself up enough to do anything useful with the cactus. She sank back, leaning into him. He hugged her firmly and pressed his cheek against the back of her neck, his stubble brushing her skin.

She closed her eyes for a moment. God ... she'd missed him so much.

Then she curled the hand with the Iron Fist around the cactus.

The thorns pierced her palm. There was pain, but it didn't matter; she'd had much worse pain from routine training. She balanced herself, centered herself, and let her chi begin to flow lightly. It was the same thing she did when she used the Fist with her katana, the delicate balance of control and release that allowed her to draw energy without letting it all out in a burst the way Danny used to.

It took her a moment to realize that Danny was helping. She wasn't sure if he was doing it on purpose, or if he even knew he was doing it -- but some part of him still called out to the dragon's fire, and it knew him. With Danny wrapped around her, a quiet and patient guide, she held onto her control, held onto herself. The fire was white-hot, but she held it back, although it burned her. This was not a task of destruction, but of purification. 

An act of love.

That was what it was, she thought, her control faltering briefly. It had been for Danny, when he'd healed her; she'd felt the love pouring into her. But it didn't _have_ to have been her. Danny could have done that with anybody. Danny loved openly and freely. Danny loved people who had never given him love back, and sometimes he coaxed them toward the light just by being himself.

She ... didn't. That wasn't her. Love for her was fierce and secret, her hidden heart opened only to a few. It was special and precious.

She didn't know how to open her heart like that to someone that she didn't love.

_But Danny loves him._

She took a deep breath and leaned her head back against Danny's and thought about the grief and pain and maybe even terror she'd seen in Ward's face when they were waiting for Danny in the hospital. She thought about Ward running off halfway around the world with Danny because Danny wanted him to. She thought about Danny walking into a death trap because the Meachums would die if he didn't. She thought about the way he and Danny smiled at each other.

She thought about family, and how confusing and complicated it could be. She'd lost hers, the ones she had been born to and the ones who had chosen her later. And then she found Danny, Danny who loved so easily, who had lost everything and everyone, and still kept bringing people into his orbit because he had a heart as big as the whole world. Danny was her family and Ward was his, and how had she lost sight of what that meant? 

_Family isn't always people you like,_ she thought, feeling blood trickling down her fingers from the cactus's spines. _It's not always going to be people you choose. It's not even going to be people you want. It's just there. It just IS._

The fire rushed through her, filling her -- a fire that was more like light, brightening and illuminating and filling all the shadowed corners of her soul, and she thought she felt something like a strong hand clasping her blood-slick fingers (she wasn't sure if it was real, though, or only in her head), and then everything went out from under her and she slid sideways into darkness.

 

***

 

She was comfortable and sleepy, drifting toward the waking world, but not quite ready to struggle her way out of dreams yet. It seemed as if there should be damp earth and leaf litter under her, but instead there was the softness of cotton sheets.

And there were voices nearby, talking quietly.

"Ha! That's rent for a hotel on North Carolina. Fork it over."

"Mother of -- you _suck_ , Danny."

"You know, for a guy who builds monopolies in real life, you'd think you'd be better at the board game version."

"I regret ever agreeing to play this game with you. I hated it when we were kids and I hate it now."

"At least you're a better loser. Kinda."

Colleen turned her head to the side. Her eyes felt like they'd been glued together; she had to peel them open and blink a few times. It was night; the first thing she saw was the drapes opened to a glittering city skyline. At the edge of her field of vision, a lamp glowed softly, lighting the room in warm golden tones.

"... And that's another railroad for me. Now I've got all of 'em."

"Any particular reason why you couldn't turn this sudden streak of business acumen into running the company that you actually own 51% of?"

"It's more fun with fake money, I guess. C'mon, roll the dice."

As the dice rattled on the gameboard, Colleen tried to say something and coughed; her throat was dust-dry.

The next thing she knew, the bed dipped next to her and Danny was touching her cheek and cupping a hand under her head. "Colleen," he said, his voice warm and concerned. "How are you feeling?"

"Tired," she said, blinking up at him. "Thirsty?"

"Ward --"

"Got it," Ward said, and his shadow fell across the bed as he leaned down to hand Danny a plastic cup of water. Colleen blinked up at him, dizzied for a moment: it was Ward, all right, in a loose white T-shirt with a few days' scruff of beard; Ward, even smiling at her a little bit, in a completely non-sarcastic way.

"Here," Danny murmured, and he helped her sit up. She started to take the cup from him, then stopped when she realized her Iron Fist hand was stiff with bandages, and took the cup in her left hand instead. She flexed her fingers as she drank, looking down at the band-aids plastered all over her palm and fingers. 

"Your hand's basically okay," Danny said. He took her hand and turned it over in his own with exquisite gentleness. "Just scratched up."

"Scratched on Ward's thorns," she supplied cautiously, putting the pieces of her memories back together. Everything was a jumbled-up blur, slowly sorting itself out.

"Hey now," Ward said, but without the usual note of -- well -- prickliness that she was used to from him, as he sat down on the foot of the bed. He looked ... unsure, and that made her look away; it was embarrassing enough when she _didn't_ have to meet his eyes.

Danny was still holding her hand. _That_ , she didn't mind. She turned her hand over and laced her fingers through his, band-aids and all.

"So you're ... you," she said to Ward, dazedly.

"I'm me," he said, then added, "Thanks to you."

Okay, that made the awkwardness even worse, and she hadn't thought that was possible. "How long was I out?" she asked Danny.

"About a day."

"Oh," she said, startled. She'd assumed it was the same night.

"Hungry?" Ward asked. "We've got enough food for an army, because I hadn't eaten in three days --"

"I knew I should have given you more fertilizer --"

The tension broke in an abrupt laugh from Ward, and Colleen choked on a giggle. "Knock it _off_ , Danny," Ward said, but she could hear the grin in his voice. "And he always gets hungry when he uses the guns. So, food."

"I ... could eat." She was actually starving, come to think of it. Danny brought a stack of takeout cartons over to the bed, then solicitously propped her up with pillows. She smiled at him and tried not to be too flattered and utterly failed, especially when he sat down beside her and rested a hand on her leg. She reached for the food and then stopped short when she saw what else was on the nightstand, shoved over to the far edge.

It was the exact same terra-cotta pot, or its twin, with a cactus in it. This one was different, taller and skinnier, with a crown of yellow flowers.

"Oh yeah, _that,"_ Ward said, giving it a dark look. "I sent Danny out to get us something to eat and maybe stop him from hovering over you for ten seconds, and he came back with that monstrosity."

"It reminded me of you," Danny said.

"I threatened to throw it out the window but he wouldn't let me."

"I like it." Colleen reached for a carton of some kind of meat-on-a-stick. She always got hungry when she used the Iron Fist, but this was something else. She was _dying._ She had to force herself not to shovel food into her mouth as fast as she could stuff it in.

"See?" Danny said cheerfully. "Colleen likes it."

"Good. Colleen can keep it then."

Danny reached for a skewer of meat-on-a-stick, and she decided magnanimously to let him have it this time; instead she opened a carton of dumplings. "You weren't kidding about enough food for an army," she said, mouth full.

"Hey, I've been through this myself, remember? I knew how hungry you'd be." He stole one of her dumplings, eyes sparkling. "Want to help me beat Ward at Monopoly?"

"He doesn't need _help,_ for God's sake," Ward said. "He's doing fine on his own."

 

***

 

She ended up falling asleep listening to them bicker over the Monopoly board. She woke some time later, she wasn't sure how long, when Danny gently removed a takeout box from under her hand.

"Nhhggh." She rubbed her eyes. 

"Hey, beautiful."

"Hey, yourself. What time is it?"

"I don't know, around one or two in the morning, I guess. Ward's got a room next door and he went back to it. I could spend the night there, if you'd rather --"

"Don't," she said, and reached for him.

His arms wrapped around her, and it was good, it was right, it was a piece of herself clicking back into place. Not misfit puzzle pieces after all.

"I can't even tell you how worried I was out there, watching you keel over like that," he whispered into her hair.

"Welcome to my world, Danny Rand."

He breathed a laugh against her neck. His breath sent a ripple across her skin and through her chest.

"It's been a long time," she murmured, rolling him over onto the bed. "You still remember how to do this?"

"I think it's like riding a bicycle. Except I haven't tried to ride a bicycle since I got back from K'un Lun, so I'm not sure if that's actually true --"

"Danny?"

"Mmm?"

"Shut up and kiss me," she said, and proceeded to suit action to words.

 

***

 

She was up before Danny in the morning, with the sun just glimmering above the city's towers. He slept like a log through her quick shower, so she left him sleeping while she went downstairs to see about coffee and maybe finding some pastries to take up to the room.

"Hey, wait! Hold the elevator!"

Colleen caught the door, and Ward ducked into the elevator next to her, his hair shower-wet and tousled. The door slid shut and an awkward silence settled over them as the elevator descended.

"Sleep okay?" Ward asked, not quite looking at her.

"When I _was_ sleeping," she couldn't help saying.

"Okay, no, don't even go there, because if you're trying to make me squirm, first of all you're speaking to someone with a PhD in inappropriate comments and awkward, poorly timed silences, and second, I've been hoping that fool would get his head screwed on straight for months, so I'm delighted he finally got around to it."

"It wasn't just him," Colleen pointed out. "It was complicated. We both had some things to work out."

Ward grimaced. "Sorry. Inappropriate comments, remember?"

She snorted a laugh as the elevator doors slid open on the lobby. As they stepped out, he said, "Colleen?"

She turned back.

Ward shoved his hands in his pockets, and rocked back on his heels before looking at her, meeting her eyes. "Look, I don't really remember a whole lot from when I was ... you know. But I do remember you. You didn't have to come halfway around the world for this. I appreciate what you did for me, and I won't forget it. Thank you."

She hadn't expected his gratitude would make her this uncomfortable. She wanted to say it wasn't that big of a deal, that she _had_ to do it, because of Danny. But that wasn't entirely true, on either count.

"Tell you what," she said instead. "You forget anything I may have said to you when you were a cactus, and we'll call it even."

Ward grinned, sudden and bright. "I can live with that."

And she took a breath, and thought about second chances and missed opportunities, and about the fact that with Danny in her life, Ward always _would_ be a part of that. "I was going to look for somewhere to pick up breakfast to take back to the room," she said. "Do you know of anyplace around here?"

"According to Danny, there's a place around the corner with great banana crepes."

"Show me?"

"Yeah," he said, and smiled. "Yeah, I could do that."

 

***

 

She landed in New York a week later, with a backpack full of dirty clothes and a small cactus in a pot. She put it in the window of the dojo where it could get some sun.

There were a few things to be done: call Misty and let her know she was back in town; call the center and grovel a bit for having disappeared for a week with no notice except for a voicemail message about a family emergency; check Danny's vigilante monitor setup (which she'd taken over) for any signs of any major disasters having hit New York in the last week that would mean she needed to call the uptown folks and have a vigilante get-together. (Based on the lack of alarmed text messages from New York, she guessed the answer was no.)

But first, she had promised to call Danny when she landed, no matter what time it was, so she did that, and listened to his bright, sleepy laugh from half a world away.

They had left the question of the future open, for now. Danny knew he could drop by New York whenever he wanted; she knew she was welcome to join the Self-Discovery Road Trip anytime she felt like it. But for the moment, this was all she wanted. He was there. It didn't matter right now if he was in her bed or on the other side of the world; he was _there,_ and they were both where they needed to be, and things could change in a heartbeat but everything was pretty okay, for now.

Relationships were work, especially long-distance ones. And families were complicated and hard and sometimes an enormous pain in the ass.

And she was pretty happy with the one she had, all things considered.


End file.
